Look, Adorno is a smart guy, I can’t attack his character like that. But to be fair, he’s calling every poet from the latter half of the 20^th century—including those who were victims of the Shoah itself—barbarians, and that isn’t a kind term. In what sense can a poet be a barbarian? Isn’t poetry kind of “civilized”? And, as long as one is writing depressing and sad poetry, wouldn’t that be a proper way of trying one’s best to understand the Shoah? I mean, we can tickle ourselves with guilt over it, no?

Pretty much everyone agrees that how we represent the Shoah matters. But the answer to this problem isn’t easy, nor is it static or unchanging as we move further and further away from World War II temporally. And while this question hasn’t been collectively “answered,” there are certainly some unspoken rules regarding what is and what is not an appropriate representation of the Shoah. According Susan Gubar, “non-imaginative” representations are generally considered acceptable, such as documentary films or non-fiction accounts and journals, while more “creative” attempts (such as poetry or fiction-forms) in which one “imagines” a way of understanding and explaining the Shoah—are generally considered insufficient or even offensive. There is an expected tone of “objectivity” that is not—and cannot—exist in the work of imagination. This is because, according to Gubar, we claim to have no way of understanding the events of the Shoah, and therefore, we don’t bother with it.[2]

But really, the question is, what is the artist “using” the Shoah for? Why must they imagine the events in such a way to dramatize them? Is there a politic involved? Or, at the very least, who can use the Shoah and for what purpose, and how can we determine that? These questions are essentially impossible to answer. But one thing is certain, that the Shoah was horrific, sad, reprehensible (these words do not do it justice), and so our representations reflect those moods.

So, what might it mean to imagine joy in the Shoah? I’m not entirely sure it’s possible. Or, if one tries to imagine joy, it is only some strange form of joy, not joy itself, but a desperate, valiant maybe, yet vain, attempt. So, what is that form of joy? What can we do with it?

Let’s take a look at Randall Jarrell’s poem “In the Camp There Was One Alive.” The narrative is simple: a concentration is being liberated by Allied forces, and in the burning rubble, there is a young child still alive, yet dying. As Allied soldiers scan the debris, the child hears their footsteps, “They have come; and he calls to them / In gladness – it is the dead.” The child mistakes their footsteps for ghosts, perhaps family members or those who he spent time with in the camp, and he begins to talk to the voices of those ghosts. But he isn’t mistaking this, the ghosts are there, talking to him, crying for him, and saying his name, to which “He laughs out in joy.” It is hard for me to accept that there is any real “joy” in this scene, despite the use of the word. The simplest yet incredibly depressing explanation is that the boy is joyful for his death, his life having been so terrifying that he is excited at the prospect of its end. And I would not blame him for feeling that way, but I wonder if there is another way of thinking through this.

Let’s take a look at another example, this one being from the 2015 film Son of Saul, directed by László Nemes. The entire film follows the point of view of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), mostly using shallow focus and framed closely on his face, as he spends a day in Auschwitz working as a Sonderkommando. Whatever is happening around him, Saul’s face remains almost perfectly stoic and emotionless throughout the film, with rare exceptions to show small degrees of anger. It is clear that for Saul to do what he must to survive, he has to suppress any significant emotions, and thus he takes on a cold and impassive posture. But at the very end of the film, after he almost unwillingly joined a revolt and has escaped the camp, a young boy stumbles upon the group of escapees, and looks at Saul. Saul, looking back at him, smiles and holds the smile until the boy runs away.

What about this boy makes Saul smile? Is this a type of joy? I guess, ultimately, what does a smile mean in a film about the Shoah? And it’s impossible not to ask this question; a smile disrupts all of our assumptions about the Shoah and what our representations of it look like. It is immediately out of place, questionable, and it signifies something important, yet what that is is unclear.

While I myself don’t know if I can correctly read the smiles in either “In the Camp There Was One Alive” or Son of Saul, I will say that, at the very least, they both challenge the way we can imagine the Shoah, an effort I find absolutely necessary. To show Saul smiling is to disrupt this proposed gaze of “objectivity” that is supposedly there in the documentary film, and it forces the viewer to question deeply the meaning of not only his smile, but of the Shoah as a whole. It says this: if one can imagine Saul smiling, perhaps one can imagine the Shoah, and begin to understand it, so as to protect ourselves from forgetting this tragedy, and to prevent ourselves from returning to it in the future.

[1] Theodor Adorno, Prisms

[2] Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew

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So, if Eliot finds coffee to be not a symbol of productivity but of unrealized productivity, where does this position him in relation to the other modernists concerning the values of futurism? Is Eliot lamenting speed, asking us to resent the expectation to be productive? Is Eliot the anti-Pound, the anti-Marinetti?

As if in reference to Pounds “In the Station of the Metro,” (“Prufrock” was published at Pound’s request), Prufrock finds frustration in his inability to make out faces in a crowd, at his bewilderment to their constant movement, and tries to comfort himself, saying, “There will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” But Eliot’s Prufrock isn’t frustrated with speed or productivity itself, but with his own inability to keep up with the pace that has been set for him. By the end of the poem, he resigns himself to a lower position in the social hierarchy, understanding that the unity of society is what propels this necessary speed. He says:

He is willing to find solace in being a part of the whole, “an easy tool,” “of use,” for something bigger. While he himself may not be able to represent the pinnacle of futurist/modernist values, he will serve those who can, “an attendant lord” to the truly exceptional ones. There is a sense of duty here, as if he has no real choice but to serve this system, like a bureaucracy he is beholden to. And if he must do this, he might as well enjoy it, “glad to be” a part of the whole.

But an important question remains: what kind of coffee was Prufrock drinking? He mentions “coffee spoons”—otherwise known as demitasse spoons—which would suggest espresso. But the poem suggests he’s in a smokey city, and with the amount of references to tea in the poem, as well as Eliot’s location at the time of writing the poem, it is likely that it takes place in London. Espresso, having barely been invented at this point, was not readily available outside of Italy and parts of France. Had it been written later, say after World War I (maybe 1922, after an interesting Victoria Arduino poster was printed, as well as Eliot’s own The Waste Land “the Hoftgarten / And drank coffee, and talked for an hour”[i] (espresso was in Switzerland early too)), or even right before World War II (1933 perhaps, officially A.M.P.) things may have been different for Prufrock. Perhaps he would have encountered a genuine espresso machine, maybe even a Victoria Arduino Mural Machine, and had himself a good cup of coffee. Hard to tell. However, soon after the publication of Prufrock, most of Italy, even rural areas, would have access to espresso via the Moka Pot.

[i] T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I outlined the basic mechanism by which the Moka Pot operates in Part I of this series, but it is especially important to dwell on the Moka Pot’s use of aluminum. Trying to maintain a level of self-sufficiency among the Italian Empire, Mussolini supported the use of aluminum as “an Italian metal… the inexhaustible Italian resource!”[i] Marinetti in his Futurist Cookbook (yes, a real book), he claims that all plates should be made out of aluminum (and also claims that spaghetti makes you weak). The Moka Pot, among other Italian productions, became a nationalist symbol, representing the technological prowess of Italian manufacturing. It is a micro-machine of expedient production—a futurist’s dream—which in turn fuels even more production for the “everyman.” Whether in Turin, Milan, or the coastal village of Pingone, one could experience the national pride of Italy, a pride based in movement, unity, and of course, proper coffee bean extraction. Italians know how to suck the very life out of grounds—fragments and ruins of a roasted bean, shored there from distant waste lands.

But where did Italy get its coffee beans from? The very origins of coffee—then under the command of the Italian Empire as a colony, existed in Ethiopia. Coffee is next to impossible to grow in Europe, and so most of the coffee consumed in Europe had its agricultural origins in an equatorial colony. Much has been said about sugar in this regard, but coffee is a similarly important crop. While Italy isn’t talked about in the same regards to colonialism as Great Britain, Spain, or Belgium, for example, it is notably responsible for colonizing the region of the world with the greatest coffee production. Thus, espresso becomes not only symbolic of the speed of futurism and fascism, but is also a product of imperialism. Without imperialism, there is no espresso, and without espresso, well, modernism isn’t… as fast.

So, let’s move forward in time a bit. After World War II, the Moka Pot became a world-wide commodity, and a symbol of the charm of Italy. The Moka Pot remains an important object in Italian culture, and according to the nearly sixteen thousand reviews the product has on Amazon presently, it’s safe to say that the Moka Pot is here to stay. As “coffee culture” continues to grow, the Moka Pot is likely to end up in more and more home kitchens (I have two myself!) where aficionados may experiment, practicing proper bean extraction—that violence which became one of the many fuels of fascist political perversity. The Moka Pot is charming; it reminds us of the romance of the Italian countryside, visions from Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, perhaps.

[i] https://medium.com/@Nicola.Romagnoli/exploring-the-caffeinated-legacy-of-italian-fascism-aff8b3db36

Call Me by Your Name is about an American graduate student Oliver travelling to Italy and the love affair he has with his professor’s son during the summer of 1982. There has been little to nothing said about the ways in which this film very subtly interacts with Italy’s fascist legacy, but the film is not ignoring it. A commonly forgotten detail about the film is that all of the main characters are Jewish, something that the son Elio learns to accept, rejecting the mother’s assertion that they are, “Jews of discretion.” Later, Elio and Oliver laugh at noticing an old fascist political poster and Elio adds, “That’s Italy for you…”—a subtle reminder of the countries’ strained past, but also suggesting that, perhaps in some ways, this past is harmless.

Throughout the film, the Moka Pot is presen, at every breakfast table and on the counter while the family’s maid does their dishes. It is embedded within the Italian landscape and atmosphere, an atmosphere of romance and charm. Instead of being the pinnacle of speed and invention, the Moka Pot is now reminiscent of the slow pace of the Italian countryside. Italy’s very own technological advancements in espresso, contrary to their original purpose, evolved to create a very different image of Italy: that of a beautiful and historical space steeped in the culture of slow food—a movement which celebrates local food cultures—even if the coffee is still be shipped from foreign shores.

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The Moka Pot, designed and introduced to the market in 1933, offered consumers an inexpensive way to make espresso-like coffee in their own home, right on their stove top or even over a fire. It works like this: water in the bottom chamber begins to boil and create steam pressure, which, pushing up through a filter of coffee, brews a dense, espresso-like coffee that slowly drips out of spigot into the upper chamber. Because of the pressure generated in the bottom chamber, the coffee is forcibly extracted from the coffee grounds, using less liquid than a pour-over or immersion brewing technique. This violence—that is, the violence of pressurized bean extraction—is what makes espresso espresso. The Italians knew that steeping wasn’t enough—there was more caffeine left, more to be taken—and thus, the espresso machine was made. But the Moka pot brought that machine into the home, in a small aluminum casing. It was espresso for all, the democratization of strong coffee, an idea we will come back to. Just bear with me please.

In 1922, Italian born artist and advertiser Leonetto Cappiello made a now famous poster for the espresso machine company Victoria Arduino, that featured a man in a trench coat leaning out of a moving train grabbing a cup of coffee. It was a brilliant idea: I mean, what better way to show the speed of it all? The brewing process, the consumption of the drink, the jolt of energy, the on-the-run ceremony, the productivity it brings, and the pace of modernity—all on display in one succinct image. Espresso became fundamental to the Italian image, and that image sought to represent one important value: speed.

Well, at least that’s the image some Italians wanted to show the world, and it actually predates the Moka Pot (a period referred to by absolutely no one as, B.M.P.). In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote and published “The Futurist Manifesto,” in which he declared the start of a new national art movement, “Futurism.” In it he writes, “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”[i] For Marinetti and the futurists, art is and must be the expression of violent, explosive creation, and glorification of the values of war, militarism, patriotism, a contempt for the past, and a contempt for women. It’s origins in Italy are especially significant, since the futurist, tired of the past ruling over Italy’s image, sought to, “deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.”[ii] For them, Italy could represent the future—the powerful, fast, and violent future—and thus, they sought to present these values in their art.

Marinetti’s literary works never received much in the way of critical praise, but his political writing, as well as several important speeches he gave, became incredibly influential to other artists. Futurism took off in the visual arts, with sculptors and painters who were intrigued by the challenge of representing speed and “dynamism” in the still image. Trains, planes, automobiles, crowds, proto-robots, and dogs—surprisingly—became favorite subjects of the futurists, and their paintings oftentimes featured a mix of harsh-edged shapes and blurred figures so as to represent movement and industry. Take “The Train Arriving at the Station of Lugo” (1916) by Roberto M Baldessari, for instance, which portrays the fast pace of modern mass transportation, through jagged confusing lines and blurred faces, like apparitions.

[i] http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

[ii] Marinetti

The Futurists were hugely important to the arts during the 20^th century, and their influence stems far beyond those who identified directly as “Futurists.” The “Vorticists,” for example, who’s manifesto was published in Ezra Pound’s magazine BLAST! in 1914, took the geometrical abstraction of futurism even further, rejection representational art completely, and was founded directly after Marinetti gave a speech in London to a group of major poets and artists.[i] Vorticism, as a response to Marinetti’s insistence that they reject the past, was also influenced other contemporary Avant Garde movements, such as Imagism and Cubism, which were both invested in abstraction and concision. So, while Marinetti’s actual writings were not critically successful, his influence can nevertheless be found among even the most critically acclaimed of modernist artists and poets, which suggests that his violent yearnings and revolutionary thoughts were not just some benign fringe, but rather, commonly shared among many of the so-called “high modernists.” Many of these writers and artists would go on to support, or at the very least “sympathize” with the fascists. After founding the Futurist political party, Marinetti wrote Italy’s first Fascist manifesto—pre-dating Mussolini’s—which eventually was subsumed by the official Fascist party. Wyndham Lewis, co-editor and founder of BLAST! was a supporter of Hitler. And Pound’s support of the fascist cause has been discussed widely.

But are there earlier hints towards this political leaning in modernist works? Or, better yet, how does modernist poetry confront the confluence of Futurism, the Avant Garde, and the impending wave of fascism?

In 1913 Ezra Pound wrote a poem named, “In the Station of the Metro.” It reads: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Is this not the very scene from Baldessari’s painting, painted just three years later? Pound is finding beauty not just in the faces, but in the movement of the faces—the speed at which they come and go, as apparitions—in the train station, arriving and departing. Not only is Pound quick in his writing—the poem is only two lines—but the scene suggests the movement of a crowd, faces been seen then lost, absorbed into the pace of the train station. And so quick is he to make an equation: that these faces are “Petals on a wet, black bough,” individual units tied together, connected to the main branch. What does it mean for Pound to turn these faces into flowers, and to hamper them to a branch? His seemingly pretty image here, can instead be seen as restrictive, in that the figures he finds in the station are tied to movement, forcibly progressing, petals waving in place, yet held together by some larger structure, the bough. It is representative, then, of the condition of modernity, the necessity for movement and productivity, and the constraints that this places on the human. And concerning Baldessari’s visual representation of this scene, the figures become one large mass, in which the individual faces blur into one shape-less-shape, relinquishing each of their individuality. Pound’s image here is not too far from the main concept of Mussolini’s fasces—the symbol of fascism—which represents societal unity visually the tying of individual sticks to a central post. In Mussolini’s fasces, however, the bough becomes an axe, suggesting a violent strength in this unity.

[i] “Futurist Speech to the English” from Marinetti: Selected Writings (1972).

I’m not proposing that there is something inherently fascist to modernism, or that trains and the concept of speed is either. Instead, what is interesting is the ways in which modernist poems either knowingly or unknowingly played into an emerging imagery which would go on to influence, inform, and ultimately, create what we now recognize as fascism. This aesthetics of materiality and particular representations of modernity (i.e. representations of the train, the crowd, etc.) is embedded in an ongoing and intricately connected conversation. Pound’s contribution is obvious—he was literally a fascist and anti-Semite—but where else might we find the fascist influence in modernism, especially where it may not be at all intended? And what other artifacts and cultural symbols (i.e. coffee) might be embedded in this conversation?

For instance, let’s reconsider Cappiello’s poster, which contains, after all, it has a train and coffee. We have already noted the way in which the poster visually represents the central tenet of futurism, that of speed, and how it does this through the use of the train as a way of highlighting the pace at which one consumes espresso, but also, the pace at which one operates after consuming the espresso. In many ways, espresso and the espresso machine are the ultimate futurist symbols. Espresso machines, for example, make use of steam and pistons just like a train, have a shiny metallic exterior, and produce a drink which makes the consumer faster and more productive. It is a machine-extension of the human, optimizing human performance through the sheer power of pressurized bean extraction. Cappiello, whether he knew it not, marketed not only an espresso machine here, but also the core values of futurism.

But, to experience the espresso machine, you had to go to a café, and probably live in the city. What makes fascism just slightly different from futurism, is that it is much better at encompassing and including the rural. This is where the Moka Pot comes in (A.M.P).

Tune in next week for part two, where we’ll take a closer look at the role of coffee in the creation of fascism, as well as coffee’s unique role in the Avant Garde poetry of American writer T.S. Eliot and the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name.

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